Re-watched QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967) — not to be confused with family R&B act Quatermass and the Pips — because Fiona was on a Nigel Kneale kick. It stands up very well. I was shocked last time I watched the first Hammer QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT to discover that the studio’s warping of the title character from Kneale’s BBC serial, to make him an arrogant bully, in fact a model for the studio’s vision of Victor Frankenstein, really worked quite well. Of course, Kneale wasn’t an anti-science, pro-church, pro-military conservative, so he was horrified by this, but as a statement of the studio’s philosophy it is coherent and compelling.

Roy Ward Baker’s film, however, restores the sympathetic Quatermass of the original series, embodied here by the feisty Scot Andrew Keir, a Hammer stalwart, who plays him like an angry terrier in tweed. James (“Madness! Madness!”) Donald, another Scot, plays heroic archaeologist Dr Roney. Nothing like Indiana Jones — he’s a heroic intellectual, the one character who seems to have out-evolved our deplorable Martian inheritance (read a plot synopsis elsewhere if I don’t seem to be making sense).

We were debating whether the Jumping Leaping Man was played by the same actor in both TV and movie version. It turns out he wasn’t, but the performance is quite similar. Remarkable, since Duncan Lamont (ALSO raised in Scotland) would not have been able to refer back to the TV serial, since it went out live and no recording was known to exist. Happily, it’s since been found. (Nigel Kneale complained that the BBC had junked his ground-breaking series while keeping all the Oxford-Cambridge boat races — “They’re all the same!”) Both actors deliver the line “Jumping! Leaping!” with demented brio, but only Richard Shaw in the original supplements this with a creepy, hilarious and bizarre lolloping gait, which Fiona will impersonate at parties for interested parties.

Very taken with the closing credits, which simply show an exhausted Keir and Barbara Shelley in the burning rubble of Hob’s Lane. Kneale was inspired by racist riots in his depiction of a breakdown of civilisation in which part of society tries to “purge” another. The credits rise somberly as the shot goes on, and on — actually it’s on a loop, with dissolves linking each repeated section, but that doesn’t seem to matter, might even be better. It’s a solution to the possible abruptness of the ending — Kneale doesn’t need to have Quatermass make a speech summing up what we’ve learned, as the unfolding story has already made its points. But simply solving the immediate problem and fading up a THE END title would seem too sudden. This approach suggests lingering unease, trauma and real consequences.

It also reminded Fiona of the ending of John Carpenter’s THE THING, where the face-off has even grimmer implications (or maybe not — the two survivors in the snow are fearful of one another — Keir and Shelley’s characters are alarmed by what they have found within themselves). Carpenter is a huge Kneale fan — an attempted collaboration on HALLOWEEN III rather fell apart, and PRINCE OF DARKNESS is a sort-of tribute, but Carpenter’s emphasis on pure emotion was always slightly at odds with Kneale’s intellectual, even didactic aspect. Two guys who should never approach each other’s material.

Although THEY LIVE is distinctive in Carpenter’s oeuvre, isn’t it? Ideas-led. And the central notion, that the aliens are already among us, quite established and in fact running our society, can be traced back to QUATERMASS II.

“Style is self-plagiarism,” goes the saying, and Hitchcock certainly repeated or developed ideas throughout his career, but the 1956 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is the only instance of his remaking one of his own films in its entirety. And he famously said that the first film was the work of a gifted amateur, the second of a professional.

But some people prefer the original — the very quick delivery of plot points, snappy pace, and loose construction, with its greater room for eccentricity and gags, is indeed quote winning. And I will go so far as to say that John Michael Hayes’ script for the second TMWKTM does have a little fat: it takes a while to get going, and some exchanges between our lovely couple (James Stewart and Doris Day) feel like self-consciously “good dialogue” rather than anything which economically combines character expression with plot development — I’m thinking particularly of the scene where Jimmy and Doris muse about which of his patient’s ailing organs have paid for which parts of their Moroccan holiday.

But asides from that, and the regrettable lack of Peter Lorre, and the fact that Christopher BIGGER THAN LIFE Olsen isn’t as winningly odd as child-woman Nova Pilbeam, I’m afraid the remake has it all over the original. It has Robert Burks on camera, Bernard Herrmann on score, two perfectly suited stars who are great together, production designer Henry Bumstead joining the team, and some excellent bit parts too. Daniel Gelin takes over ably from Pierre Fresnay as the suave French spy who kicks off the story. The principle villains, Bernard Miles and Brenda DeBanzie, start the film so spectacularly colourless that we never suspect them of any role in the plot, and then he becomes increasingly sinister as she becomes more sympathetic. Richard Wattis, a well-known comic face of the period, gets a tiny walk-on as a flustered underling and makes every second count. And the younger of the two taxidermists featured is played, brilliantly, by Richard Wordsworth, Caroon the mutating spaceman from the previous year’s Hammer hit, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT.

All this and Carolyn Jones!

Special mention needs to be made of Reggie Nalder as the assassin, Rien (good name!). Adding exotic creep factor where Miles and DeBanzie exude normality, the facially-scarred Austrian enters movie history with a few lines and an alarming smile. Like fellow Euro-creep Daniel Emilfork, Nalder is a good actor with a great face, someone who kept being discovered by moviemakers without acquiring full-on fame. See him in Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, and Salem’s Lot, always adding unbeatable production values with his alarmingly taut smile. He looks like at any moment his skin might split and let his skull get at you. And he knows it.

Fortunately, there isn’t too much Reggie — an entertainment like this couldn’t stand it — and Hitchcock leavens the grim child-abduction plot with humour and intrigue. But he doesn’t fail to take the emotions seriously. Day’s big scene, where her husband dopes her before breaking the news that their child is gone, is a showstopper, fully justifying Hitch’s faith in his unorthodox casting choice (I’d love to have seen both Shirley MacLaine and Doris Day do more films for Hitch). And her utterly savage look when she re-encounters one of the kidnappers in Ambrose Chapel, London, is very impressive too.

Having been to the Marrakech International Film Festival (a luxurious affair, I recommend it if you get the chance) I always enjoy seeing the city on the big screen, even if much of the action here conspicuously takes place before a rear-projection screen. There are still some gorgeously vivid Technicolor ‘scapes to enjoy.

“The Muslim faith allows for few accidents.”

When the makeup man couldn’t find brown makeup for Daniel Gelin to wear that would rub off on Stewart’s fingers, exposing white skin, so at Gelin’s own suggestion Stewart applied white paint to his fingertips which would then smear pale streaks across Gelin’s blacked-up face. At any rate, this second appearance of blackface in a Hitch film is less uncomfortable than the drummer man in YOUNG AND INNOCENT.

One example of typically Hitchcockian cheek — when Daniel Gelin is chased through the streets by bad guys, he falls in blue paint, making him easy to pick out among the otherwise similarly dressed Arab populace. Then he’s stabbed by an assassin (Nalder?) and the police run right past him, after the knife-man. It seems slightly implausible that they’d disregard the man they’d apparently been chasing — and why were they after him anyway? The whole sequence seems rather hard for to make sense of in light of what we later learn. But it’s excellently staged.

London! The gang of showbiz cronies crashing in on Stewart and Day (as the McKennas — I dig how Jimmy Stewart usually has a Scottish name in his Hitch perfs, cf Scottie Fergusson) seem a little overstretched, but are actually the set-up to one of the most delightful last-scene pay-offs in any Hitchcock movie. And the scattered references to real life celebs like music-hall and movie star Bud Flanagan are pleasing, reminding us of the world of the original TMWKTM.

A slowly developing pleasure in this film is Bernard Herrmann’s score, which confines itself to non-melodic, vaguely eastern sounds in the Moroccan sequence, until Stewart gets the phone call announcing his son is a hostage, and then a familiarly Herrmannesque spiraling tinkle announces the start of the truly Hitchcockian scenario. And the music gets more and more archetypically Herrmann as we reach London — after THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY, which is an exception because it’s not a thriller, this movie feels like the development of the Hitchcock-Herrmann style is going on as the movie unfolds before you. Beautiful.

I love the deserted London streets, and the eerie POV/reaction sequence as Jimmy Stewart navigates the mean alleys of Camden Town and I love the inappropriate but welcome comedy relief of the taxidermists. Many things to cherish here: the slow, pointless intrigue of the elder Ambrose Chappell giving way to the younger. The fact that all the staff are in their dotage. A camera move that circles a big cat, only to reveal it is minus a back end. The shot that posits an extremely menacing tiger head behind Ambrose Jnr, for comically exaggerated menace. The fact that Stewart’s garbled story about the late Louis Bernard seems to be giving poor Mr Chappell the impression that Stewart is a maniac who wants to have his deceased friend stuffed and mounted. And the slapstick fight with swordfish and tiger as adversaries. Plus the prefiguring of PSYCHO.

More deserted streets outside the real Ambrose Chapel, in darkest Bayswater, scene of a wonderfully scary approach and look to camera by the often-alarming Brenda DeBanzie. Some tricky coming and going manages to separate Stewart and Day, although it’s a little surprising how little in the way of set-piece drama is created (but the suspense never lets up, and unlike in the first version of this story, Hitch and Hayes keep the McKennas separated from their son right till the end). Surprising that Stewart has to break out of the church by shimmying up the bell-rope to the belfry, anticipating VERTIGO, when he could just have smashed a window on the ground floor.

The Albert Hall assassination attempt manages to top even the matching scene in the original film, via dazzling shots like the one showing the shadow of the conductor’s baton (Herrmann in Hitch-style cameo) touching the top of each note in the score, and the amazing perspective along Nalder’s gun. This is the first musical motif to reach a climax, with the cymbal clash as signal for the hitman (also dig the percussionist’s POV shot looking between his cymbals!), and it’s quite quickly followed by the second, whereby Doris Day’s call-and-answer rendition of Que Sera Sera enables her to locate her son in the foreign embassy. (Which foreign embassy? While the thirties version kept its conspiring nation nameless, it clearly resonates with the pre-war tensions of the day; the remake shuns all reference to the Cold War and studiously avoids political meaning of any kind).

Surprisingly, the sinister ringleader, Miles’s boss, is never detected, despite being the mastermind of the whole scheme, and surprisingly we don’t care. As little Chris Olsen is reunited with his folks, Hitchcock, impatient with sentimentality, dissolves to our last shot, the aforementioned beautiful pay-off, so smart and unexpected and deftly delivered and hilarious that it reconfigures everything we’ve just seen as a splendid joke by the Master.

Most of what you’ve heard about DISTRICT 9 is true. If you haven’t heard much, you perhaps shouldn’t read further because there’s no way to avoid a certain number of spoilers here, and I enjoyed the film knowing practically nothing about its story. You might want to do the same.

Saw the movie with Fiona and regular Shadowplayer “m” (Mary), whose South African origins proved invaluable in decoding the film’s imagery and plot. The movie is produced by Peter Jackson (with FX by WETA, his digital effects house) and directed by Neill Blomkamp, from a screenplay by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, and shot in Blomkamp’s native South Africa.

The plot’s premise, which is all I knew going in, is that 20 years before the story starts, a huge alien mothership descends to Johannesburg and… just hovers there. The malnourished aliens found therein are housed in a refugee camp which quickly becomes a slum, and by the time of the story have become a fully-fledged underclass and a political football.

Enter Wikus Van Der Merwe, a bureaucrat assigned the job of obtaining signatures from the alien population authorizing their transportation into what is basically a concentration camp. Followed, initially, by documentary cameras, he enters District 9, and a world of pain.

Mary pointed out three major ways in which the film is indebted to its country of origin (I like the idea of other countries producing US-style blockbusters, as long as they don’t lose their local identities).

(1) Any time South Africans tell a story about a stupid white Afrikaaner, he’s always called Van Der Merwe. “So, Mr Van Der Merwe walks into the pub…”

(2) Obviously the idea of an alien underclass is a partial allegory on the whole history of Apartheid, and obviously its one fraught with difficulties. Mary pointed out that the forced mass relocation which this film centres on was a very South African phenomenon in the bad old days.

(3) The aliens are derisively known as “prawns.” (“You can’t say they don’t look like prawns,” says one interviewee, defensively.) This is a reference to the Parktown Prawn, an insect pest that began infesting Jo’burg in the ’60s. Mary thought they were possibly an Antipodean import, but this appears not to be the case. Still, it’s appropriate to a New Zealand-South African coproduction.

The movie is a lot of fun, and quite emotional at times. This must be what they mean by “character arc”: Wikus starts off as a comedy asshole, like David Brent in The Office (n analogy strengthened by the film’s mockumentary style) , then gradually becomes a hateful asshole as we see him strutting his stuff in the ghetto, a government hatchet man who’s really in the pocket of big business (the use of private sector mercenaries is a nod to the present situ in Iraq), then becomes a pitiful victim as things turn against him, and finally, at the very end, he’s a kind of hero worthy of our respect. That kind of movement is rare in a commercial movie, even though all the execs read their Robert McKee and are devoted to the idea of character change.

The first half of the movie is ideas-driven and political, the second is basically a video game. But a really good one. It’s the first movie I’ve seen to feature a gravity gun — a kind of cannon that lets you pick up heavy objects telekinetically and then fire them like rockets: Wikus creams one soldier with a pig carcass.

Of course, the allegorical approach to race via sci-fi is tendentious. Even as a kid I felt uncomfortable with CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES presenting itself as a satiric slant on black power. Blomkamp gets himself into some very deep water by presenting the aliens as drones in an insect race, their leaders somehow M.I.A. When a clever “prawn” with the slave name of Christopher Johnson turns up, it’s not clear if the aliens are smarter than previously assumed, or if he’s part of the missing leader class. The idea of an insect social structure is fair game for sci-fi, but perhaps unwise if you’re intending any kind of comment on human society. Also, considering the film’s aspirations to “say something” about race, its treatment of Nigerians could do with being a bit more nuanced.

Where the movie gets interesting is when Wikus is “infected” by an alien device which causes him to start mutating into a prawn himself. While the outward manifestations — loss of teeth and fingernails — are a direct nod to Cronenberg’s THE FLY, and his pursuit by the authorities as he tries to conceal his heavily malformed arm harks back to THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT (AKA THE CRAWLING TERROR), the plot idea has shades of THE WATERMELON MAN — and FREAKS. The idea of taking a bigot and turning him into the very thing he sees himself as superior to, and then subjecting him to the attendant persecutions, is also explored, in cruder terms, in John Landis’ ill-fated episode of the TWILIGHT ZONE movie.

Some of this is surprisingly moving. As his DNA crosses the human-alien “colour bar,” the authorities seek to “harvest” his organs to help unlock the secrets of alien technology, which so far has failed to function in human hands. Sharlto Copley’s performance, broadly comic at first, becomes chillingly desperate, and there’s also a heart-breaking performance from a CGI alien he’s forced to kill in a weapons test.

Of course Wikus escapes, now able to use alien weaponry, and becomes a one-prawn killing machine, suited up in an ALIENS-style exoskeleton, with self-targeting death rays (Blomkamp rather overuses the “blood-spatter on camera lens” effect) and grav gun. Joining forces with Christopher Johnson, he’s mutating not just into an alien but also into an outsider hero.

Like I say, enjoyable, emotionally engaging, flawed, interesting. Blomkamp has some of the bad-taste gonzo gusto of early Peter Jackson, without the more crass elements (I recall with a shudder the AIDS jokes in MEET THE FEEBLES), and the epic ham-pomp of late Peter Jackson, without the hideous bloat of LORD OF THE KONG. Lots of giant plot questions unanswered, but they’re so foregrounded I have to welcome this invitation to enjoy a bit of “negative capability.” And there’s always the sequel to sort things out.